Profile Information

About Me

I've been a female working a "man's job" (mechanical engineer), stay at home Mom (6 kids), working Mom (6 kids to put through college), unemployed, underemployed, temporarily employed and now working from home!
We live on an old, small farm with 2 dogs and 2 cats in the house, variable number of chickens out in the yard.

If Chivers is correct, and the CIA is funneling arms into Syria, (and I would tend to credit his information), does Obama know about it and/or did he approve it?

I'm not sure who approved our activities in Afghanistan when the Russians were there (Charlie Wilson's War), but I do know that a hell of a lot of people who never heard of Afghanistan back then are paying a terrible price now.

When my kids were little, I was able to buy American made clothes easily. Then I had to start searching. Then I had to give up. Gradually, all the fabrics at the fabric store were made overseas. For a long time, I could find sheets made in America. Finally, the last time I looked, I couldn't find any towels made in America.

As near as I can tell, here's what happened: Say a mill can turn out the product at 5% profit. Say a foreign mill offers a 10% profit. The large stockholders, who tend themselves to be institutions, pension funds and investment funds, will push management to push manufacturing overseas to pick up that extra 5%. So will banks offering operating and capital loans. In other words, American operations don't just have to make a profit, they have to make as much or more as the outfit overseas. I've seen it with retailers, too. They started buying from plants overseas, but didn't drop prices accordingly.

One way around this that I can see is some sort of labor tariff - even a gross one based on relative minimum wages. Tossing in a pollution tariff wouldn't hurt, either. All rivers end up in the same ocean; we all breathe the same air.

We might also want to consider penalizing retail establishments over a certain size that fail to ensure proper working conditions at their contractor's plants. When Walmart has to shovel out money top police working conditions overseas, it may reconsider buying its products here, where the government is at least expected to enforce safe working rules.